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Facebook’s Privacy Changes Draw More Scrutiny

By Brad Stone December 10, 2009 1:44 pmDecember 10, 2009 1:44 pm

Since I wrote about Facebook’s privacy changes on Wednesday, there has been more criticism of some of the changes. While Facebook has given people more refined controls over who can see particular pieces of information they post, one controversial move is that several pieces of data are now visible to all members on the service: your name, city, gender, photograph, the profile pages you are a fan of, and your list of friends.

Facebook says it has done this partly to make it easier for users to search the morass of 350 million users — many with similar names. It points out that users could never restrict the visibility of their name, the networks they belonged to or the pages they were a fan of, and that gender was (mostly) always discernible from a user’s name and photo.

“The change we’re announcing is equivalent to requiring a name to be in a phone book completely out of order without a phone number,” wrote Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, noting that there were other ways in the privacy settings for people to avoid being found in search results by non-friends. But, he noted, “Users come to Facebook to connect and share, not to hide.”

Still, privacy organizations and some users are critiquing the move. In a blog post, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (disclaimer: my wife works there) called this part of Facebook’s privacy change “downright ugly.”

Users are “coming to share with whom they want to, which is not necessarily everyone on the Internet,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff lawyer at the group, noting that these privacy distinctions were what always differentiated Facebook from MySpace, and the rest of the Web. “Now Facebook is clumsily trying to change the game and push users to share more than they ever have before.”

At least some users agree. One wrote to Bits yesterday objecting to the fact that his friends list was now visible to everyone. “It’s certainly a violation of my privacy policy. My own ‘personal’ privacy policy specifically states that I will not share information about my friends with any potential weirdos, child molesters, homicidal maniacs, or anyone I generally don’t like,” he wrote.

Facebook is also being criticized for recommending that users set the privacy controls to share their status messages and other content with anyone on the Internet. The company says more than 20 million users have used its tool to review their privacy settings, and more than half have changed an option from the choice recommended by Facebook.

“In our minds this is clear evidence that the privacy advocates are wrong and the process is transparent and informative,” said Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman. “Our users are smarter and more attentive to privacy than privacy advocates are giving them credit for.”

I’m curious what our readers think about these changes. Those who are particularly upset with the quasi-public aspects of Facebook’s service can, of course, take advantage of one killer Facebook feature: not using it at all.